If a cow gets sick, the Funks treat her with antibiotics and then sell her in auction, sometimes to another dairy and sometimes as meat. A few cows get sick every week, but with 4,400 cows, they can afford to give up a few. They pasteurize milk and feed it to young calves. Feeding calves milk is another added expense of organic farming. In regular dairies, calves are fed a formula, which is much less expensive than pure milk. But in organic dairies, pure milk is required.
The trick of organic farming is to try to keep cows from getting infections, something that is all the more difficult to achieve when there are thousands of cows. Dirk Reitsma at the Sunrise Organic Dairy near the Funks’ farm said, “Organic farming is all about prevention.” He uses an Israeli-invented system. Each cow has a thermometer on its leg and there are “labs” in the milking stalls that monitor the health of the cows and warn the farmers if there is any sign of sickness. “If you catch it early, we can just give some vitamins and don’t need antibiotics,” Reitsma said.
Organic rules require a minimum of 120 days of grazing a year, and during that time, 30 percent of the dry matter eaten must be from the farm’s own pasture. The Funks grow about half the hay they use, and almost all the barley, but they have to buy very expensive non-GMO proteins—canola, soybeans, and flax.
The Funks’ milk is sold raw to Horizon for double or even triple the regular milk price. And that price is guaranteed in three- or five-year contracts, so it is very stable. This is one of the advantage of selling to a large company. For most dairy farmers, the instability of milk prices is one of the greatest challenges they must deal with; it makes planning very difficult.
Organic farming started in the 1960s, but organic milk became popular only in the 1990s. Revelations in 1991 about antibiotic residue in nonorganic milk made some people switch to organic. People wanted to know that their milk was produced with special care. Once organic milk became widely available, it became the top-selling organic food. Organic milk took on a number of burning issues. The cows were not to be treated with hormones or antibiotics, or fed GMO grains. There was also a general belief that organic cows were better treated than cows in crowded factory dairies.
With milk, popular perception is more important than science. The issue is whether customers will accept a higher price for milk that is made in a special way. There was no exact definition of what organic was until the U.S. Department of Agriculture established rules in 1997. In 1998, when organic milk was new, sales were $60 million in the United States. But unfortunately, meeting the government requirements for organic farming was prohibitively expensive for small farms. Today, Horizon alone, the largest organic milk producer, sells $500 million worth of organic milk a year. It is one of three large companies that have cornered more than 90 percent of the organic milk market.
Horizon buys milk from six hundred organic farms around the country, some of which, such as the Upsons’ Belted Rose, are quite small. But all the milk from both large and small farms gets mixed together in tanks and packaged as Horizon. Large national companies were not what the enthusiasts of the organic food movement had in mind. The organic movement is tied to the locavore philosophy—the belief that quality food comes from small local farms that produce with great care because they know their customers. This is why dairies like Ronnybrook that are not organic are preferred by some city customers to organic dairies.
Beyond all the modern debates about hormones, antibiotics, genetic modification, and chemicals is a fundamental question that after ten thousand years has still not been answered. That is, if a dairy did everything right and its milk was perfect, would it be good for you?
After all, adults drinking milk is not natural. Neither, for that matter, is babies drinking anything but their mothers’ milk. The 60 percent of the world that is lactose-intolerant are made the way nature intended humans to be.
But then there is also what the biologist E. O. Wilson called “the natural fallacy” to consider. The fallacy, according to Wilson, is the belief that whatever is natural is always what is best. To take medicine, wear clothes, or read is unnatural. And to farm, to grow food rather than gather it from the wild, is unnatural.
An organization that calls itself the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine urges a dairy-free diet and denounces feeding animal milk to children. When the National Dairy Council, which can rally herds of physicians to back up their claim that milk is healthful, ran a “Got Milk?” campaign, the Physicians Committee retaliated with a mocking “Got Beer?” campaign.
There is considerable evidence that consuming large quantities of whole milk can raise cholesterol and lead to heart disease. This is why low-fat and skim milk have become extremely popular. There are also claims that milk can cause certain types of cancer, such as ovarian cancer, but there are as many studies refuting these findings as supporting them. Others claim that milk causes osteoporosis, but that charge seems largely based on the fact that Asians, who drink far less milk, are less affected by this ailment. Asians may also be aided by the fact that they generally get more exercise than do Westerners and eat more vegetables and less protein. It would be interesting to know whether now that milk consumption is on the rise in Asia, osteoporosis is on the rise as well.
Meanwhile, while some are blaming milk for bone loss, many credit it with bone building. Mainstream science and medicine tell us that milk is a leading source of calcium, vitamin D, and other bone-building nutrients, and we are also told that milk helps prevent hypertension.
When the National Dairy Council was formed in 1915 to promote milk, they started telling families that milk would make their children big and strong, which had been the reason the Japanese Emperor had encouraged milk drinking. The National Dairy Council’s first brochure was titled “Milk, the Necessary Food for Growth and Health.” The endorsement of milk by athletes became a tradition, and in the 1960s, the American dairy industry touted the words of Vince Lombardi, the Green Bay Packers coach with one of the longest winning streaks in football history, who said, “I have never had an outstanding successful athlete who was not a hard milk drinker.”
Soviet milk maid.
There is a persistent belief that milk makes children grow taller, though there is not much scientific evidence behind this. Milk increases something called IGF-1, which has been credited for making people taller, but IGF-1 breaks down in the body and added amounts from milk might have little impact. The entire idea of milk and height may come from the coincidence that children drink the most milk in the years when they are doing the most growing.
Technology has come to dairies, and computers are being used for everything from milking to cow nutrition. Devices like the rotary milker are becoming increasingly automated. Some farmers in England now save wear and tear on the herd with a mobile milk parlor, a machine with stalls that is taken out to the pasture so that the cows do not need to come in for milking. New devices are increasingly worked by robots, and though the technology is currently expensive, many farmers are longing for more robots, because all over the world it is becoming increasingly difficult to find skilled farmworkers. The work is hard, the hours long, and the pay meager.
In the future, there will still be dairies producing milk and all the milk products, and most of the old debates about milk will still be heard. But much of tomorrow’s dairy food will be produced by robots. And this will surely open many more new debates on the relative merits or disadvantages of robot-made milk. History has shown that as civilization develops, it creates more, not fewer, arguments about milk.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I never really thought much about milk until Ann Marie Gardner asked me to write something about it for her handsome magazine, Modern Farmer. “Later,” she said, “you can write a book about it.”
I salute the memory of Orri Vigfússon, a kind and dedicated environmentalist, for all his help in Iceland. He had nothing to do with milk, but once he heard that I was writing about it, he started arranging appointments. Orri was like t
hat—an extraordinary man who will be missed.
Thanks to Lorraine Lewandrowski for her help and advice and all the other dairy farmers all over the world who showed me their farms and took the time, a precious commodity for dairy farmers, to talk to me.
Thanks to my great friend Christine Toomey for driving me to the wilds of Wiltshire, and un merci chaleureux to my friend Bernard Carrere for taking me to his Basque friends in the heart-stoppingly beautiful Basque Mountains. Thanks to Laura Trombetta for so much help, fun, and adventure, as well as endless yogurt, in China and Tibet.
Thanks to Lata Ganapathy and Rachna Singh Davidar for help in India and to Pankaja Srinivasan for answering all my questions with so many insights.
Thanks to Mirto Siotou for help in Greece, and to Michael Blake from the South Australia government (PIRSA).
Thanks for the help given me by the wizardly Jackson Hole chef Wes Hamilton on a trip through the pass to Idaho Falls. Thanks to Duncan Fuller for his help in central Idaho.
Author feeding a kid on a Vermont farm. (Photo by Dona Ann McAdams)
Thanks to Brad Kessler and Dona Ann McAdams and all the kids for their hospitality and all I learned on their Vermont goat farm.
Thanks to Nancy Miller for editing my book with the same care as the other seventeen she has edited. Thanks to Christiane Bird for her skillful help. Thanks to Charlotte Sheedy for being my friend, adviser, and most wonderful agent.
A special thank-you to the intrepid and bilingual Talia for her assistance in China, India, and Iceland. And to beautiful Marian for all her help.
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